June 2018

For with God nothing will be impossible Luke 1:37

June 2018

We are all very excited at Jacob’s Well Appeal as we start the maternal and baby unit at Ouagadougou. When we first visited Burkina Faso in 2016 we saw the shell of a hospital which had run out of funds several years previously. It stands beside a clinic/small hospital where local christian doctors give their time for free to help the poor in the community. The clinic has an Out Patient department, a small ward with about 4 in-patient beds and a very small labour room where up to 4 women may be giving birth. The clinic is cramped and extremely busy. The patients pay nothing if they have no money or, if they can afford to pay something,they pay around 50% of the cost of attending a government hospital. In Burkina Faso there is no national health service and the patients attending the national hospitals run by the government have to pay – this is something that I find very difficult to comprehend. The idea that someone who is extremely ill would be turned away from a hospital because they have no money is so alien to our experience.

We are completing the work in 4 phases and money will be sent out at the completion of each phase. Phase one (electrical wiring and buying tiles) is complete and phase 2 (tiling the area and buying the doors) is under way. We plan to visit Burkina Faso later this year and hopefully by then the maternity and baby unit will be in action!

The pregnant ladies wait patiently in the heat of the day.

Initially the estimates to do the work were so high that it looked as if we would never get started. With perseverance we have managed to get quotes for the work that are a third of the original costs and also our partners in Ouagadougou were able to get some of the plumbing work done by an American charity, reducing the costs further.